A surprising twist has emerged in the tale of a New York politician who found Linux had been installed on his office computer after miscreants supposedly broke into the locked room.
After his office windows were smashed by rocks, Michael Grimm, a US Republican who represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, denounced the " …

Does Richard Stallman have an alibi?

Re: Does Richard Stallman have an alibi?

Of course he dislikes open source since it has been hijacked by lots of big corporations (Microsoft too is open source in case you might wonder) so now he prefers Free and Open Source. Do you have anything in particular against end-user digital freedoms ? In case you do, we would appreciate if you'd share it with us.

ɔıbɐɯ ɟo puıʞ ɐ s,ʇı :ǝɹ

Re: It's a kind of magic

"corrupted and erased the hard-drive of the campaign computer server"

Except earlier in the article this "Windows machine" was in fact a server containing "confidential campaign files and polling data". Which begs the question why anyone has access to it, let alone is rebooting it and shoving a Linux disc in.

Being a server though, it will obviously have had backups enabled so no real problem? (There might be some sarcasm in there - but I don't know the actual answer or even if it was a server.)

Still weak explanation!

It is absolutely impossible to erase a hard-disk just by inserting a Linux installation CD in a computer. You need to start and go through the installation procedure up to the point where you define partitions and the changes will be written on hard disk only if you confirm you really want to do it. You can't install Linux by mistake, even the most incompetent Windows user can't do that.

incompetent Windows user

You think you're talking about an incompetent Windows user. You have to remember that the person who cocked up was a campaign staffer. A level way below a windows user like many other politicos. Just witness any politicians' attempts to control the Internet.

Re: Still weak explanation!

Indeed... First the machine has to be set to boot from CD, then rebooted. Next there are dozens of selections and menu options before partitioning... And that's hardly straight forward even if you want to install it!

I say someone was told to install it, but put it on the wrong machine and is now hurriedly covering their arse.

Re: Still weak explanation!

Re: Still weak explanation!

I see from the comments that some people think that it had to be deliberately installed because no one is that clueless to accidentally install it. Trust me, people CAN be that completely clueless!

I know of one person who accidentally reinstalled Windows 98 over the top of Windows 98. Upon asking her, eventually it transpired that she was looking for a possible password feature and despite the multiple obvious-to-techies prompts during setup she was just clicking on "Next" (or whatever the exact prompt is in Windows Setup - it's been a long time since I've done a Windows 98 installation) in a vain attempt to find the feature.

Are you sure?

I have never seen a Linux install disk, Live CD or Alternate, that didn't ask at least twice, if you are sure you want to destroy existing files. The staffer may have messed up and thought he was doing a dual boot or whatever but I doubt "autorun" wiped the box.

Someone accidentally installed Linux? Installing Linux is much easier than it used to be - but the number of warnings 'are you sure that you want to delete all data' should be high enough to warn everyone except the biggest morons. Oh - he was working for a political campaign - never mind...

Magic

US Pols

It would be difficult to underestimate the technical ineptitude of the average US politician. When this fact is combined with their predilection to speak first and save the challenge of coherent thought for some future time, we get news reports like this one.

Re: My theory

I think you're getting close. I was thinking more along the line that the person was fooling around with a Linux install and then when confronted, decided it was better to call it "an accident" rather than being branded a commie.

A part-time staffer (probably a kid that knows a little about linux) decides that "upgrading" the campaign systems is a good idea because windoze suks. S/He probably even received permission from the higher ups to do it, although most likely they completely misunderstood the request.

The person completes the install and goes home for the day. Sometime that night the 14 year old breaks the window. The regular people come to work the next day and see the windows broken. Fearing a real break in, they check the computers and all of their data is missing!!

Instant call for the police and media (probably not in that order) to come in. They make a claim that miscreants hate the democratic system and get a few headlines.

In the meantime, the part-time staffer shows up either later that day/night or the next day. Goes to check on the computers and says, "Hey! the install is done." At which point the adults in the room figure out what happened and try to come up with a way to say, "oops" without admitting they were actually wrong.

As a final note, the part time staffer gets to keep his/her job because ultimately this whole fiasco led to a lot more publicity about the campaign than their miserable attempts have thus far done.

So he had his windows broken and then he broke his windows?

pun

This seems to be the nearest that El Reg commentards have got so far to the obvious pun on "breaking Office Windows".

As for Linux installation "deleting all my files", I for one have been pretty pissed off when Ubuntu trashes /usr /etc, especially when it ends up screwing up initramfs so that that machine ends up being unbootable.